Health information exchanges are being established to promote the electronic exchange of health-related information between health care providers, which will require the participating health care providers to be able to transmit their data according to certain data standards. Examples of such data standards include the Systematized Nomenclature of Medicine—Clinical Terms (SNOMED CT) standard for diagnostic and clinical data, the Logical Observation Identifiers Names and Codes (LOINC) standard for laboratory data, the RxNorm standard for prescription drugs, and the International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems (ICD-9 and ICD-10) standards for billing and other purposes. Thus, a single healthcare provider may need to be able to send and receive data according to eight or nine different data standards. The data is then received by the health information exchange from the various health care providers, where it is stored and made available to other health care providers.
As a result of such initiatives, the medical community is quickly becoming overloaded with data. But, the data may contain vital information about a patient that the caregiver needs to know when treating that patient. For example, buried within the data may be information about the patient's current prescription drugs or preexisting conditions. It is important that relevant data be located and made available to the caregiver when it is needed so that appropriate treatment decisions can be made.